Content Writing For The Web ~ Is It Really Different?

Content started out as Queen

Content writing for the web used to be a great challenge to me. Now it is just a challenge. Maybe someday I’ll even get good at it.

It is has been hammered into my thick skull that website content writing is vastly different from content writing anywhere else. Yes, I know it’s different because of SEO and search engine rankings, but I really don’t believe that it has changed all that much.

We all know what the world’s oldest profession is, and we can joke that the second oldest profession is marketing. Truthfully, that is no joke. It seems that the “girls” would have a unique pattern cut into the soles of their sandals so that when they walked through the sand or dirt streets of town, they left their mark. A trail was made right up to their door. I really can’t tell you what the ROI was, but the conversion rate had to be 100%.

Fast forward to the modern era. Print and multi-media marketing have not changed. Success boils down to relevance and conversion. It would do no more good for someone to be motivated by an ad, run out to the local car dealership only to find out the car company has no warranties, service plans, or genuine knowledge of what they sell, then it would’ve for an interested follower of one of the “girls” to find out when he got to her door that she suffered from leprosy.

What about a marketer (every one of us are marketers) that does a super job with content writing for SEO and has a flood of traffic to their site, but fails to get the correct message across?

Look at the the phenomenon of Web 2.0. Talk about hot. Why? Relevance. There are millions of targeted group pages, forums, and communities on the Internet. Web 2.0 is a marketing windfall, but the same old principals are applied. Keywords or action words are employed to target consumers and gather them into one place to hear the “pitch”, or read the ad.

The laundry soap and household goods marketers didn’t really advertise anywhere else, but on afternoon television, for decades, until the market started to evolve and broaden. Two large companies made bold moves by marketing their laundry soap and pantyhose on NASCAR racing automobiles. Why? The sport was growing at amazing rate and the demographics showed that in the southeastern region of America, women made up exactly one half of the followers of the sport.

Yes, writing website content that is keyword rich is tantamount in gaining traffic from the search engines, and making a targeted effort at the relevant groups will get you fans, but the bottom line is conversion. Conversion comes through valid and genuine content. Google knows this, as EVERY word on your page is considered and weighed into the algorithm. Your readers know this as they read in hopes that you can offer them a solution. A solution that they can trust as being targeted towards their needs.

The “girls” practiced SEO with targeted symbols on the soles of their shoes, and offered relevant content. The car companies employ keywords in their television ads by separating trucks from luxury cars and suvs; delivering genuine content by having dealerships that specialize in certain vehicles they manufacture, and we, as Internet marketers, use keyword laden content writing to entice the search engines to deliver targeted traffic to our site(s), where our persuasive rich content is infused with the keywords to provide the reader with a trusted solution.

Imagine, what if there was one slip of the carving tool, causing the symbol to advertise faith healing? Talk about a high bounce rate.

Thanks to Okinawba for this post’s picture

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